


The Day the Magic Left: A Reverse-Fairytale for Tired Grownups

by Vituperative_cupcakes



Category: The Mighty Boosh (TV)
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-17
Updated: 2014-08-17
Packaged: 2018-02-13 12:26:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2150673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vituperative_cupcakes/pseuds/Vituperative_cupcakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One morning when Howard Moon wakes up, the magic is gone. The boys have to learn to live with it</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Day the Magic Left: A Reverse-Fairytale for Tired Grownups

**Author's Note:**

> it's depressing but it gets better i promise

There came a day when the magic ran out. When Howard Moon woke up as plain old Howard Morrington in a bedroom drained of color. He rolled over and snort-coughed.

“Oh, shit. Vince.”

It was the day they realized that the colors they'd been living with had all been brighter than possible, the day Howard creaked open the door to Vince's room and found him sitting in a magpie's nest of tatty finery. The day that they locked eyes and realized that nothing would be the same again.

“I’ll go put the kettle on,” Howard volunteered numbly.

It was the day Howard saw that their flat for what it was, a humble squat cowering beneath the mess of two confirmed bachelors, where no woman would dare set foot no matter her blood alcohol content.

It was the day Naboo entered the kitchen and Howard saw that their landlord was not a mighty wizard, but Vince's little brother Neil who, despite his career as a dealer, was light-years ahead of Vince in ambition. The day he opened his mouth and spoke a phrase that made Howard's stomach turn sour and snuffed out his appetite.

Vince came to the table wrapped in a comforter, outfit dilemma abandoned. He looked not like an ageless androgyne beauty but a still-quite-attractive man in his mid-to-late thirties. Seeing this, Howard knew that he was only in his early forties, but suddenly felt much older.

“Alright, Howard?” Vince said. And Howard wanted, more than anything, for it to be alright. Instead he opened his mouth and ruined the illusion that anything could be the way it once was.

Neil had signed on to follow some band as their personal psychadelic pharmacy. Bollo (Brian, how could he ever be an ape?) was going with him. Effective immediately, Neil was no longer fielding their rent.

“Well, that's it then,” Vince said, and bit a piece of flatbread in half.

Adjusting to real life was like coming down off the biggest heroin high imaginable.

Animals didn't talk. Music didn't pour out of every receptacle at convenient moments. They were, for lack of a more befitting and despairing term, grounded.

Howard had to remind himself he was not open to the universe's practical jokes whenever he turned a corner. No, even worse: nobody so much as glanced at him. Vincent Narayan suffered as well. Going clubbing in his no-longer-too-beautiful-to-be-ridiculous finery had been a huge blow to his ego: girls now assumed he was overtly, fabulously gay.

Howard and Vince regrouped over a poor fry-up, sharing the last mug of tea.

“Nest egg's about to run dry,” Howard mused, “no idea what we'll do for money.”

“I guess that means the band's off, then?” Vince said.

They laughed, painfully.

The first morning after Neil left, Howard had picked up a guitar and discovered what had been true all along: he was no multi-instrumentalist. He wasn't even a single-instrumentalist. He couldn't play so much as an egg slicer.

“Jobs, I expect.” Howard sighed.

Vincent glumly broke his toast in two and handed it to Howard, who buttered it with a sliver of margarine.

Being fabulous, as it turned out, did not trump experience in the job market. Even when Howard, having ditched Vince on pretense of phoning his mother, begged for an application at Mark's and Spark's, the well ran dry. He found Vince hunched over on a bench, in a fabulous jet-black overcoat that did nothing to keep him warm. Howard hesitated for a moment and then crushed Vince against his side

“Come on, little man,” he said.

One by one, Howard pawned his musical instruments. Vince took entire shopping bags back to upscale boutiques and raised such a fuss he was rewarded cash _sans_ receipt, at the cost of ever being able to shop there again. When he presented Howard with a stack of bills, the northerner felt his eyes mist up a little.

“Steady on,” Vince said, “it's not even as if I looked good in that anymore.” And he was only lying slightly.

They both took to sleeping on the couch, too tired and too depressed to make a bed or brush teeth and all that. Right around the third time Howard sold his blood for money, Vince burst in the door like a flock of corgis, all excitement and scrambles.

“Howard! Howard! I've got us a job! A job in music!”

And Howard was so happy he completely ignored the no-touching rule and gathered Vince up in a hug.

The enthusiasm stayed past the revelation that the job would not be so much “in” music as “with” music. Some older bloke ran a record kiosk that he needed someone to man, someone not afraid to look silly, someone who could deal with a constant tide of hipsters without becoming homicidal.

“That's us down to the letter,” Howard crowed.

Slowly, the tension eased. Howard found he did not flop immediately into the willing arms of dreams the second he got home, but would stay up to chat with Vince, eat dinner, even watch a little telly. Vince really wasn't dumb. Howard didn't know how he'd ever thought that, or how he'd ever mistaken himself for a genius. A genius would never have been rooming with a school chum at his age. A genius would be rich by now.

Vince scoffed at this over breakfast. “Yeah? And plenty of geniuses graduate school and slum the rest of their lives. Anyway, what's wrong with living with a schoolmate, eh? I thought living with someone you like was one of those lifegoals, or summat.”

And Howard didn't have the heart to correct him that usually, living together with someone you went to primary school onwards usually meant you were in a relationship. He still hadn't gotten over one Camden dolly-bird who looked him up and down with scrunched nose and then bust into laughter.

They lived through weeks of noble poverty, weeks of good-natured arguments over whose turn it was to bathe, who had the cash to pay the gas bill, before Howard realized he no longer missed the magic.

After the steep drop of that first morning, it had simply been a steady climb back into normal life. Colors were muted, emotions too. But in their place was a new appreciation. Howard had never felt such a strong joy at a forgotten fiver in the couch as he had completing a symphony no one would hear.

The oddest thing was he no longer minded it. When he timidly broached the subject at breakfast, he braced for the worst.

In his mind, Vince had got the worst of it. Vince had been popular, pretty, liked, all for doing nothing.

Now he squinched one eye and chewed exaggeratedly on a piece of toast as he thought, swallowing with the aid of an entire glass of milk.

“Yeah, alright,” Vince said, “I do miss it, not going to lie, but...it is kind of _fun_ , being a grownup. Isn't it?”

And Howard had to return his cheeky grin. _All right, it's decided. We're having fun._

And they did.

It didn't matter how stupid people were sometimes, asking if they carried mini-discs or shit like that, he and Vince were having fun. It didn't matter if the heat was off, he and Vince could share a blanket. And it didn't matter if they bumped elbows all the time, or sometimes they ate off one plate, or that Howard suddenly liked watching Vince nod off to Sesame Street...

_Oh._

After raising (painfully) the subject, the matter was settled under a comforter. And that, as they say, was that.

One year after struggling to pay bills, sharing a duvet cover and rushed breakfasts, Howard put down the pot scrubber he'd been using and and looked out the window.

And gaped out the window.

The magic was back.

Howard tensed, afraid to vocalize at all, lest the magic be frightened and leave for ever. He cleared his throat gingerly.

“Vince... _Vince?_ ”

“Alright Howard?” Vince snorted, coming up from behind to drape himself over Howard's shoulders, nuzzling his lips familiarly behind his ear. Howard was only momentarily distracted.

“Do you see...” he waved to the window, unable or afraid to say. Vince squinted out past his hand, looking for an errant bird or crashed UFO. Finally, he twigged.

“ _Oh,”_ he said, “yeah, it's been like that.”

Howard chewed his mustache irritably. “and you were going to tell me about this, when? How long has it....been?”

“Since...” Vince flushed and looked down, disguising a laugh as a cough. “Well...you know.”

Howard stood, one arm awkwardly extended full away from his body, cheeks burning.

“Well,” he said, “that's...” he made a noise like an arthritic horse and Vince couldn’t disguise the laugh this time, laying a peck of apology on the right corner of Howard's mouth.

And afterwards?

Well...

After that Vince traipsed off to the couch, and Howard finished the sinkful of dishes. Then he closed the window. The magic would still be there the next time he looked out.

And the next.

And the next.

 


End file.
